Lust On Trial

Download or read book Lust on Trial written by Amy Werbel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.

Download or read book Taming Lust written by Doron S. Ben-Atar and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1796, as revolutionary fervor waned and the Age of Reason took hold, an eighty-five-year-old Massachusetts doctor was convicted of bestiality and sentenced to hang. Three years later and seventy miles away, an eighty-three-year-old Connecticut farmer was convicted of the same crime and sentenced to the same punishment. Prior to these criminal trials, neither Massachusetts nor Connecticut had executed anyone for bestiality in over a century. Though there are no overt connections between the two episodes, the similarities of their particulars are strange and striking. Historians Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown delve into the specifics to determine what larger social, political, or religious forces could have compelled New England courts to condemn two octogenarians for sexual misbehavior typically associated with much younger men. The stories of John Farrell and Gideon Washburn are less about the two old men than New England officials who, riding the rough waves of modernity, returned to the severity of their ancestors. The political upheaval of the Revolution and the new republic created new kinds of cultural experience—both exciting and frightening—at a moment when New England farmers and village elites were contesting long-standing assumptions about divine creation and the social order. Ben-Atar and Brown offer a rare and vivid perspective on anxieties about sexual and social deviance in the early republic.

Download or read book Outlawed! written by Charles Gallaudet Trumbull and published by Scott Matthew Dix. This book was released on 2013-03-02 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One man fought the battle for national purity... and won. By the 1870’s, a young Anthony Comstock arrived in New York City in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution. America was changing. As the world’s first billion dollar company was being formed, rural families flocked to the city and immigration exploded. New technologies coupled with metropolitan anonymity enabled the rapid spread of obscenity, contraception, and abortion. Insufficient laws had not caught up to new challenges and Comstock saw how these vices would have a detrimental effect on the family and American culture if not properly checked. At the age 28, he made an unconditional surrender of his life to the will of God; he gave up his personal ambitions and took God’s will for himself, no matter what might be the cost. He entered the fight. He began by making citizen’s arrests and incredibly within a year he found himself in Washington, DC meeting with congressmen and drafting the Postal Act of 1873. The Comstock Act, as it soon came to be known, passed in dramatic fashion during the final hours of the 42nd Congress and Comstock himself was shortly thereafter surprised with an appointment to be its chief enforcer with the newly created office of U.S. Post Office Special Agent. Thus, Comstock embarked on the life work in which he would serve for the next 42. This thrilling and remarkable story tell the account of how Anthony Comstock fought the battle for national purity and won. “Fear thou not; for I am with thee. No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper.” (Isaiah 41:10; 54: 17)

Download or read book Pornography on Trial written by Thomas C. Mackey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-11-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the changing and charged relationship between pornography and legislation in 20th century America. Groups battling pornography must demonstrate that the products they seek to ban are truly obscene and not legitimately protected by the First Amendment—a requirement that often leads to public debate and controversy. Author Thomas C. Mackey thoroughly examines the problems and issues in public policymaking, legal precedents, and the people behind them. After a brief historical background, Pornography on Trial surveys and analyzes the leading issues and case law on obscenity from l957 to the present. Half the book consists of documents—judicial opinions—from key cases. There are biographical sketches of key people, laws, and concepts from Judge Learned Hand and the Hicklin test to Chief Justice Sir Alexander James Edmund Cockburn's judicial definition of obscenity from l868. The book also includes a chronology, a table of cases, and an annotated bibliography.

Download or read book Trial of Translation written by Adam L. Wirrig and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the Bible transition from the medieval Vulgate to the vernacular forms of the Protestant Reformation? What about from Erasmus’s Greek text? Were there significant differences in the various vernacular Bibles of the Protestant Reformation? How did this or didn’t this come to be? Utilizing the unique Greek text of 1 Corinthians 6:9, this book explores the relationships between culture, location, theology, and the art of biblical translation within the Protestant Reformation. Far from a simplistic transition from their previous forms, this work details the differences even one singular text of translation might find within the various locales of the early modern period. Ultimately, the text details that, in addition to faithful thought, location, culture, and community necessities drove the art of biblical translation in the Protestant Reformation and early modern period.

Download or read book A Full Account of the Trial of Simon M. Landis, M.D. written by Cyrus R. Morgan and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Trial of Jesus from a Lawyer's Standpoint written by Walter Marion Chandler and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: